Picture of the Day-February 25, 2013.

A love inspects the distorted promise.

Pictures of cellphones (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I headed back to work today.  They managed just fine without me, although I’m pretty sure that my co-worker, who had to take my place at Toddler Time, would have rather I had been there.  Not that she doesn’t like kids, it’s just that it’s an exhausting hour and a half, and having it sprung on you without warning is not the best way to be ready for it.  I think I need to bake her a thank you gift of some sort.

I seem to have caught a head cold somewhere.  I don’t know if it’s the same thing that cause M.’s croup, and I don’t think it’s what H. had because my throat isn’t really sore, but I do also have quite a bit of contact with the public at work.  Especially with children who, as we all know, are little tiny petri dishes just waiting to infect someone.

Tomorrow is the family party for H. and M.’s birthdays, which were  both this month.  My in-laws, my mom and some family friends will be here.   I have work to do around the house, a cake to bake, and things to prepare.  I also have a headache, possibly a slight fever and the attention span of a ferret.  It’s not going well.

As for my cell phone, I use it as my alarm clock.  I distinctly remember setting it last night to go off this morning for work.  It has since vanished.  I thought I put it in its usual spot on my nightstand, but it’s not there.  I don’t remember it going off (which really means nothing since I turn it off in my sleep on occasion), and I tried calling it with no response.  So that’s another thing I’ll have to hunt down today.

Or maybe instead, I’ll take a nap.  Who needs a clean house, right?

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Cough and the Common Cold (Photo credit: RobertFrancis)

I thought we were safe.  We’d made it through all of our (admittedly mild) winter without a single emergency room trip for M.  No sickness, no hands slammed in windows, nothing.  Then, two days into Spring, M. woke up at 1 in the morning with a bad case of croup.  She was coughing and choking so hard she actually broke blood vessels in her cheeks, so now she looks like she has freckles, only she doesn’t.

The usual in and out of the steam and the cold(er) air outside didn’t help, but it rarely does with her, so off we went at 2.  She had a vapor treatment, a nebulizer treatment and 2 doses of steroids since she threw up the first dose.  We got home finally around 5 a.m. and she needed a snack because her stomach was now empty and she was hungry.  I finally got her back in bed, and went to sleep myself for less than an hour before I had to drive S. to school, get H. out to her bus and then call work to say there was no way I could run “Toddler Time,” or drive there to do so, on this little sleep.  My boss happens to be very understanding and not easily rattled, so she said not to worry, they’d figure out coverage and I should stay home.

Since my mom was coming to watch M. while I worked, she just came anyway so she’d be here when M. woke up so I could sleep for a more reasonable amount of time.

M. is doing ok now.  She still sounds a little scratchy and coughs every once in a while, but she’s on steroids for 4 days and has her inhalers too.  She’s just such a cheerful little thing.  Even at the hospital, she just wants to be friendly and tell everyone things about her birthday, and her toys, and her brother and sister.  She’s like a friendly little puppy.

How is your spring going?

Pulmonaria 'RedStart' X (Photo credit: Henryr10)

Tomorrow is the first day of Spring, at least officially.  We’ve had spring-like weather for the last couple of days, and I couldn’t be happier.  The flowers are starting to come up.  So far we have had a lot of leaves with no buds, but yesterday we noticed some miniature daffodils in bloom, as well as a large purply-pink flower of unknown variety (we did just move here last fall).  Today some of the Pulmonaria started to grow buds.

I love going out each day to see what is coming up now.  My rose-bush is budding, as are lots of other trees and plants in our yard.  M. and I have been doing some gardening, mostly removing a covering of brown leaves from last fall, and I plan to get out my books and try to figure out what all the things in our flower beds and gardens actually are now that I can see them.

We’ll be planting a little on our own this year, but not too much because I want to see what’s already there before we make any major changes or additions.  We do have a few veggies to plant, and some strawberries, sunflowers and tomatoes.  And watermelon, if I know my girls.  Otherwise, we’ll just be enjoying what we already have.

I hope you’re all getting out into the beautiful weather if you’re up here in the NorthEast!  Do any of you have plans for this Spring?

This week’s focus is split between the garage and M.’s room. We’ve been using half of the garage to store things moved from the old house that haven’t been unpacked yet since we didn’t have a second car for that bay.  Chris’s work truck was too huge.  Now he has a little car, so I want to clean it out for parking purposes.  I can do that over time, but I need to take care of the front part by tonight because tomorrow morning we’re having our generator installed, and it would be great of the electrician could get to the electrical panel and the generator.  Since Monday was a gorgeous day here (70′s and sunny), it’s pretty much done.  I need to move a very large fish/animal tank into the storage room, and take out the recycling tonight, but otherwise it’s all set.

M.’s birthday party is Saturday, so besides keeping the rest of the house clean, which is much easier after getting it straightened out for H.’s party, I need to work on M’s room.  I’m putting up some bright green paper behind her built-in shelves.  Her walls are wood-paneled, and since we’re renting for now (we plan to buy the house after we’ve rented for two years) I can’t take it down or paint her room.  Since “wood-paneled” is hardly any preschooler’s idea of a dream room, I’ve done a lot of things to decorate it and make it look more like a little girl’s room and less like a home office.

Putting up the paper shouldn’t be difficult, and she picked it out so it’s a color she likes.  Once the paper’s up, the shelves can go back on, and then I can arrange stuffed animals on the shelves once more.  That alone will go a long way toward cleaning up the room.  After that, it’s a matter of putting things in the right places and vacuuming the rug.  Ideally, I’d have time to rent a carpet cleaner and wash the carpet, but I won’t this week.  I would like to do that before the family party on the following weekend however.

So that’s the plan.  Week 2, already half over, is the front of the garage and M.’s room.  What are you working on this week?  If you haven’t already done so, you can read OrgJunkie’s Week 2 post here.

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I worked this morning, came home and ate, checked email (aka “screwed around online”), then jumped in.  I was planning a 20/10 but it became a 45/15 instead.  I went up to my older daughter H’s room, she of the birthday party with a bunch of 12-year-old girls tomorrow, which she had cleaned up this morning.  She has a full-size keyboard (all 88 keys, a pedal, a bench, the works) that needed to go live on its stand instead of on her dusty, and often cat-infested, floor.  So I did it.  WITHOUT the directions, which she had apparently cleaned up and put away before leaving for the afternoon.  It’s together, and it’s right.

Next, she had a table that she got for Christmas.  It’s a night-stand size table and the sides are peace signs.  We tried to put it together a month ago, but being fairly cheaply made the screws didn’t fit far enough through to actually be useful at holding things together, so I needed to find my box-o-screws (thank you Dad!) which took no time at all actually.  What took so long was finding time to put the thing together.  Today, I brought my screws up with my screwdriver set, and put that sucker together.

Then I rearranged her room a bit.  It wasn’t in my job description, but to fit the keyboard in against a wall instead of the middle of the rug where it had been squatting, it was necessary.  If she doesn’t like it, she can always move it back if she can figure out a better way (one that doesn’t involve putting the keyboard by the heaters).

Next, I’m on to either the library or a combination of that and M’s room, since most of the stuff that doesn’t belong in the library migrated there from M’s room.  And by most I mean all.  Updates later, if I’m still alive and not buried under a pile of stuffed animals.

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I posted 8 boxes to ThredUp.com, one of which has already been ordered. I packed the box, labeled it and I’m ready to ship it tomorrow.

I’m making a good effort to keep up with dishes.  I got to take today off of laundry duty.  I could have done more downstairs today and didn’t, but I spent time doing crafts with M. so I don’t mind that I didn’t get more done.

All in all, not a bad weekend.  How about you?

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The garage has been used for storage since we went down to just one car, and my husband’s work truck.  The truck was too big to fit in the garage, and since we still had stuff we were moving over from the old house it was a convenient place to put it all temporarily.  His company finally gave him a car since you could see the road through the bottom of the truck, so now he’ll be able to park it in the garage once there’s room.  Also, we’re finally having our generator installed on the 15th, so anything in the way of the circuit boards or the generator itself needs to be moved.

The family room needs to be cleaned up and better organized because H. is having some friends over the weekend of the 10th for her birthday party, and they need a place to hang out where they won’t make the rest of us crazy.  Much.

While I don’t necessarily expect to have everything completely put away in both places, I need to sort out a lot of boxes and figure out which rooms everything should be in or whether it should stay here at all.

One extra thing on my list is to put together a table in H’s room.  It’s partially put together, but then we realized the screws they included in one part are NOT long enough for the parts they’re supposed to connect if we want the table to actually stay together.  They just about reach, but not enough to screw in securely.  I found the longer screws, so now I just need to do it.

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Still, we have only been here for a few months and are still unpacking.   I’ve taken it slowly because I refuse to have stuff everywhere.  When I unpack something, I want to be able to find a place to put it.  If I can’t, or I don’t need it, out it goes.

With all the unpacking and organizing (and reorganizing) going on, I’ve found two sites that have some great tips and/or encouragement.  One is Orgjunkie, which I have known about for a while through OpenSky.  I had never actually been to the site, and finally got there tonight.  There is a series of posts on organizing throughout a whole year, taking on one small project each week.  I think that’s a good way to deal with all the unpacking and sorting and decorating, so I’m following along with the posts now.  The series is from last year, but I’m just starting at week one and working from there.

Now, that’s a great idea for the long-term stuff, but what about the more immediate concerns?  I can’t have the laundry pile up or the counter become a paperwork nightmare because it’s not the right week to handle it.  There are some things that need to be dealt with now, and regularly.  Enter in “Unf*** Your Habitat,” a Tumblr blog that encourages, threatens and–if necessary–just plain scares you into behaving and getting things done.  Their slogan is “Terrifying motivation for lazy people with messy homes.”  Oh yeah, that’s definitely for me.

Between the two, and just my need to keep my nice new house…well, NICE, I’m keeping up with all the laundry and dishes and regular washing of floors that just does not come naturally to me.  Not that I don’t know what to do, but I never really learned this stuff.  As a teenager, my job was to keep my grades up at school.  I had two chores at home:  dusting and washing/putting away any dishes there when I got home from school.  I still hate doing dishes, but I’m good at it.  I can dust like a madwoman.  For everything else, I learned once I moved out on my own.

So while my adventures in organizing may not be as much of an adventure for some of you, I’m betting there are plenty of you out there who could use the push to get moving too.  Feel free to join in, comment if you want to and let me know how things are going.

For this week, check out Orgjunkie’s intro post from her 52-week challenge, and the post for week one.  Print out the 52-Week Checklist if you’d like, and let me know where you’re starting your first week.  I’m still deciding where to start, but I’ll post again as soon as I know.

Well?  GET MOVING!

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